When Unigine released the first iteration of its Heaven benchmark just over three years ago, I’m not sure I realized that we’d still be using it today. All too often, a benchmark comes along that holds great promise, but then dies off due to a lack of updates. That sure hasn’t been the case with this one, which has just reached its fourth major version.

While Heaven looks quite similar on the surface from one version to the next, Unigine deploys many improvements and feature additions to make the upgrades worth it. This time around, the company has taken a couple of pages from Futuremark’s book.

One added feature that I’ve wanted for a while is presets. Much like like the design in 3DMark, the presets here will allow benchmarkers to quickly choose a profile to run for the sake of ease. This is something that should have existed since version 1, because it makes things so much easier for the sake of score comparison.

The other page taken from Futuremark involves an “Advanced” edition, designed for benchmarkers who take things a little more seriously. This edition adds command-line operation, detailed csv results files and demo-looping for stress-testing.

Other inclusions in all of 4.0 include GPU temperature and clock monitoring, stars added to the sky at night, improved SSDO and lens flares, added detection of multiple GPUs and anti-aliasing support within the Mac OS X client.